I found this when browsing through Disney+ a couple of nights ago.
It is impossible to deny that John Williams, as my brother put it, "wrote a few bangers". So of course the music here is fantastic. That he's still sharp at 92 (demonstrated by the documentary about him which is also on Disney+) equally so.
But it is the orchestra that shines most. Not just the individual players, but as a collective example of what is possible when a whole stage of people work together in perfect harmony.
The violinists, the brass section, the cellos, the percussion - each group produces a sound that is so much more than what a singular player could do.
But combine those groups and it is nothing short of magical. I was mesmerised just watching them all move together in concert.
Agile Octopus is a product from the UK energy supplier Octopus which we signed up for in December 2023. Since it is now January 2025, that means we have a full year of data and I thought it might be useful to write up our experience.
With Agile, your electricity price changes every 30 minutes based on the current wholesale price of electricity in your area. Your gas stays at a fixed price, whatever the current fixed rate tariff they have is. You need to have a smart meter installed, which did take some back and forth because the one that came with our house was not compatible, but generally we found that Octopus provided good support and did fix the problems we had, even if it took a couple of months (while Scottish Power ignored me for the previous 5 years...).
Around 4pm every day, they release the rates for the next 24 hours. We use an app called Octopus Compare which gives us a nice graph of what these rates are going to be. I also use Home Assistant Octopus integration to show the current and next electricity price on our kitchen dashboard screen (more about that another time).
This allows us to quickly check what the price is going to be and decide whether or not it is a good time to switch on the dishwasher or tumble dryer and generally move our electricity usage to times when it is going to be cheaper. We cannot shift everything since both my wife and I work from home, but we can at least make the effort.
We also have an electric car, so being able to charge that during the night or weekends when the price is very low has definitely made a big difference.
The rates can vary wildly from day to day, but we have found that over the past year the average rate is still below the current best fixed tariff they (or anyone else in the UK) offers. There are times when the kWh price is less than zero, meaning they are paying us to use electricity. And there are times (although this has only happened twice) when the price is £1 per kWh, which is the highest it can be. At these times we definitely do not charge the car.
In Scotland 90% of our electricity comes from renewable sources, mostly wind. We are surrounded by hills and those hills are covered in wind turbines. So what we have noticed (and I wonder if this is true in other parts of the UK) is that when it is windy, our electricity the next day will be cheap. When it is not windy (like now, when it is just frozen outside, but otherwise very calm) our electricity price can be very high. Thankfully, Scotland is pretty windy.
If I do a comparison of our Agile Octopus cost versus the alternative 12M Fixed Cost, across the whole year our electricity costs have been 22% less than what they would have been.
Of course it is not always that straightforward. It may not be good, if it is not fast. And it may only be possible to make it fast at the expense of making it good.
But that does not mean it is not a useful way to describe the process to someone who is not experienced in the suffering of the average software developer.
What is often missing in the explanation to the non-experienced manager is that the time between each of those steps may be double the previous.
Imagine a form where a user is going to enter a delivery address.
A basic working version may have all the necessary fields, a name, a couple of generic address fields, perhaps a city, county, postcode and country. It will save to the database on submission.
But making it good and making it fast require significantly more effort. Addresses are complex. Maybe some form of postcode search or global address autocomplete would be better, but that's a big database to manage yourself. Validation sounds easy, but not every country has postcodes. And even searching for your country in a list is a pain if you have to scroll through a lot of them just to find the United Kingdom. Perhaps the most common countries that use your website should go at the top.
There's lots of little decisions that make it good. And some skilled technical know-how to make it fast.
When you want me to estimate something, is it just to make it work? Or do you want it to be good? And if you want it to be fast, then how long have you got?
It may take a week to make the feature work. Two weeks to make it good. And four weeks to make it fast.
The quality of a software product is often determined by which of those the manager is willing to bear.
And the quality of a software developer is often determined by how much they care about making it good.
I don't have many problems with WiFi (I use an Asus RT-AX82U). But for my Synology and other mini PCs mentioned earlier, it's just better if they're on Ethernet. But despite my best efforts while they were building our house, the builders wouldn't put Ethernet cable in for me, so I must resort to retrofitting.
As I'm trying to avoid drilling holes in all my walls and ceilings, I first turned to Powerline adapters. But despite trying three different models from different suppliers, none of them worked reliably, especially across different floors of my house. This was the case in my previous house too, they just never work for me.
But like most new-build houses in the UK (our house is 8 years old), I have old-fashioned RF aerial sockets in each of the rooms, all of which go to an aerial booster in the loft. This is so I can receive over-the-air television, also known as Freeview in the UK.
After a bunch of hunting, I discovered this goCoax MoCA 2.5 Adapter (sold out as I write this). MoCA is known as "Multimedia Over Coax", which is a very American sounding protocol for sending ethernet over existing coax cabling. I bought two of these and installed one downstairs attached to my router and plugged into the aerial socket behind my TV, and the other one upstairs in my office. Along with a little Netgear Switch, it has allowed me to extend my network with minimal of effort.
I do have an aerial booster in the loft, so I did switch that off. I don't have any TV's plugged into the aerial sockets anyway, because my kids don't know what linear TV is. I'm not 100% sure if this is necessary, but I found some advice online that it was, and I did have some additional difficulty getting things to connect.
It's been 4 months since I installed this and it has been 100% reliable. No drilling required. I just wish there was an aerial socket in my garage and I could extend it further.
I am not a Godot developer, but I am a fan of Super Mario World. And this video series presses my nerd buttons. It's interesting to learn more about both.